By Elizabeth Clark

As the Earth’s tilt moves further from the sun the onset of nightfall sidles closer; in the UK, streetlamps flicker on earlier and curtains twitch shut sooner, and there is a collective, vain effort to ward away encroaching Autumnal darkness.

However, despite best efforts, there is an ever-present darkness which cannot be cast aside by light. In fact, even in broad daylight its depths continue to fascinate us. The sea strikes a chord between morbid curiosity and the Awesome—a muse for millennia, it never ceases to amaze or terrify. It is a human obsession we can trace back to our evolutionary beginning, picking through our art, history, and biology to unravel its unadulterated sublime.

Thalassophobia is defined as the fear of the ocean. Although a recently coined phrase this fear is deeply rooted in the human condition in all its “sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishing-boat bobbing” glory (Under Milk Wood- Dylan Thomas [1954]).

This biological drive has been interpreted as “Thanatos” by Freud, as in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) “The Call of the Void” (l’appel du vide), and, in the brain, as a by-product of a hyperactive hypothalamus and basal ganglia. Impervious to our changing understanding of the human psyche, the delicate balance between fear and fascination remains unaltered.

Take the narrative archetype of the “Flood Myth”: from Noah’s Ark in Genesis to that which predates Abrahamic religion, such as Utnapishtim’s tar-and-pitch boat in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Vedic myth wherein Manu was warned by a fish of a great flood—the sea and its destructive potential have enraptured us from the start. It is embedded in our culture and shapes the fabric of many cosmological stories.

Thalassophobia could be said to comprise part of what Carl Jung believed to be humanities “collective unconscious”. Indeed, its presence haunts all human recesses, including the artistic. A distinctly fearful apprehension casts its shadow over William Turner’s fraught seascapes, as viewed through a haze, encapsulating the duplicitous desire to both turn away from such scenes and an inability to do so.

At the heart of our oceanic fear lies the Uncanny, Freud’s “unheimliche”, which is born from the uneasy contrast between comfort and discomfort. In other contemporary works such as Coleridge’s iconic epic The Ancient Mariner (1798) and Jules Verne’s notorious colonial novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1872) the ocean is presented as uncharted and treacherous. Nevertheless, for Captain Nemo the sea is a refuge where he can remain “mobilis in mobile” apart from the “ignorance of man”. On the other hand, for the Ancient Mariner “the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky, [lie] like a load on [his] weary eye”. For one man, the sea represents a freedom of expression aligned with the constant flux of the sea, but for the other it represents the depths to which guilt and shame can blight the mind.

This perhaps raises another question: why the sea? Humans fear a myriad of equally sinister things such as heights, darkness, and the unknown. What, when compared, is so frightening about the sea in particular? The sky is the natural counterpart to the sea- the sea mirrors the sky and they both encompass the fear of the unknown, darkness, and vertigo associated with height, albeit flipped to become depth when applied to the sea.

Atkinson Grimshaw’s paintings were famed for their interplay between light and water. Therefore, pieces such as Silver Moonlight (1880) and Boar Lane, Leeds (1881) which create atmosphere by transforming wet streets with moon and gas light, and “Reflection on the Thames” which use reflection in water to convey a deep melancholy exemplify how the sky and the ocean can combine to be viscerally evocative of the Sublime.

The ocean’s horizon, similarly, has symbolised futility and uncertainty as well as boundless freedom; where the sea almost imperceptibly meets the sky there lies a tangible fear. In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) Pi recalls the feeling of being astray in open ocean, in the midst of “liquid life”, whilst having to fight for his own. This is the central dichotomy surrounding our fear of the sea.

The sea is a womb within the body of the sky. Cooled and warmed by ocean gyres it buffers our atmosphere, acts as a carbon sink, provides us with food and maintains ecological diversity via the recycling of marine debris. That we know this does not negate our fear. What it promises to protect it also promises to destroy. Take the land now beginning to sink, or, more aptly, to be sunk: the Fens, which the sea is claiming back from centuries of agricultural manipulation, areas of New Orleans and Venice, precarious on its stilts. There is the still the more eerie ever-presence of all which has already sunk. Myths such as Atlantis and tragedies such as the Titanic, which, at their crux, invoke a fear of the sea.

In the essay On the Supernatural in Poetry (1826) Ann Radcliffe made a distinction between Terror and Horror wherein Terror “expands the soul” and “wakens the faculties to a high degree of life”. The sea, as it is a creeping force of steady erosion and slow shifting, is fit to terrify us by reminding humanity of its triviality, but is patient enough to stimulate the imagination in the absence of imminent threat.

As Nietzsche phrased it in Beyond Good and Evil (1866): “if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”. We are fascinated by that which we are afraid of. Fear reminds us both what we have to lose and what we have to gain. Perhaps, then, the sea is as life-affirming as it is existential because we are never more aware of how short life is than when death is within touching distance.

ST.ART does not own the rights to any images used in this article.